You Are The Reflection - Part I
A scientist sees into another world, and runs into some unwanted consequences.
If you’ve already read this, read part 2.
Dr. Gilkus glared at the long man in the mirror.
“Not working,” he mumbled.
He waved his right arm and saw the expected response reflected back at him.
“It’s not working.”
Behind him, his young assistant fidgeted.
“I have been telling myself that this would be the final test. I was sure that it would work. But now…”
After a breath, Thomas, the assistant, finally spoke up.
“Sir, are you certain the maths are corr-”
“Yes! We’ve each gone over each calculation tenfold!”
Thomas picked up and flipped through the hand-written equations anyway. His eyes moved over one of the pages for a full minute. The corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes focused on some distant point in space. He set the pages back on the table. Gilkus, still staring into the would-be technological wonder that was his mirror quietly resigned to the situation.
Finally the doctor turned to his student.
“I’ll see you in two weeks Thomas. Close the lab tonight.”
“Yes, doctor.”
The doctor slumped out of the room and didn’t show his face for two weeks.
…
He returned to the lab with a quickness in his step and a straightness in his spine. His treelike stature complemented his bark-like facial skin, full of crevasses yet ruddy after his much needed rest. His hat, which he hung along with his coat as he entered, rose almost 6 inches above the top of his head.
“Look who’s returned!”
A volley of happy gasps came from the side of the room where Dr. Gilkus’ colleagues and students were. “Welcome back doctor”s and “How are you sir”s were offered and the glad doctor once again returned to his working post. There he noticed an unusually tidy desk before him.
“Thomas?”
“Yes, doctor?”
“Where are my notes?”
“Middle drawer on the left. I thought you might like to come home to a clean desk.” Thomas made quotes around the phrase “come home” with his fingers.
“Ah, thank you Thomas.” Gilkus pulled the drawer open as he repeated a diminished “thank you”. A sunny glint in the drawer gave him pause.
“Thomas?”
“Hmm?”
Gilkus held up a stately ball point writing pen. It was gold dipped and engraved with the title Dr. Emmit Gilkus.
“That was not my idea.” assured Thomas.
“Then who?” the doctor asked. His eyes skipped across the room stopping to consider each scientist standing there. His eyes rested on his only young female student. His face became a soft smile.
“Maryanne. You are a princess.”
“The whole lab missed you doctor.” said Maryanne.
“And the doctor missed the whole lab.” said he, drawing his gaze across the team. “You are all royalty! Well, now that you’ve given me an entire week’s worth of attention, let’s get to work!”
…
In the evening of that day, Dr. Gilkus was alone in the lab; and now that he was alone, he could look over a letter he had received from a certain government agency. Apparently, a weapon project he had worked on was going to be secretly commissioned and withdrawn from all originating sources. He shuddered. It was a reminder that he had once spurned his conscience to create a thing meant to kill a great many people, in the name of peace and security of course. Had he been 30 years younger he would have been thrilled to receive this letter. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The weapon’s plans were locked in a safe, but they would soon be out of the doctor’s hands. He was less sure now of the capability of governmental hands than he had once been.
He carefully locked the letter away, feeling a little less glad to be back than he had before and made the rounds, reading from his student’s journals and leaving them notes for the morning.
Not once had he heard even a whisper of the failure from the fortnight before.
They were being polite. It was nice to have a day to get back into the routine, the doctor thought, but I’ll have to bring it up tomorrow in the morning meeting. Otherwise, it will continue be a dead weight hanging over everyone.
Dr. Gilkus walked into another room. One he had avoided that day. In it stood the mirror.
It was tall enough to contain the doctor’s full height and twice as wide as that. He noticed that someone had thrown a tarp over it which hung to the floor. As he began to clear instruments off of one of the tables he didn’t pay much more attention to the mirror other than to acknowledge it’s placement in the room.
As he let his mind wander, his sleepy hand pushed a glass cylinder onto the floor. A shattering broke the silence of the lab. The doctor jumped.
When the glass had settled and a thousand pieces of it were spread all over the lab, Dr. Gilkus retrieved a small broom and pan from a closet and began to sweep. The desk he had been working on sat directly in front of the mirror and his back was then toward it. His ear piqued at a slight aberration in the silence, a footfall.
Is someone still in the lab? No, he’d been in every other room to clean thus far.
There had been no sound at the door latch either. Then again, his mind had been absent for several minutes before the breaking of the cylinder. It was possible that he just hadn’t heard whoever it was enter the lab.
He presumed it would be harmless to call out for a response, if anyone was there.
“Hello?” he called toward the door to the main room.
Something in the sound of his voice and the thought that maybe somebody is there did an unidentifiable, but substantial, thing to Dr. Gilkus’ level of ease.
“Dr. Gilkus?”
It was as if he had heard his own voice on a record but without the hiss and pop of the grooves. It was his own voice which came with a slight flutter from behind him.
He stood and spun in one motion. The mirror then lay before him, still draped with a sheet. He looked at it with a curious wonder which was layered, in part, by fear.
“Yes?” he said to the mirror. A gasp came from beyond the sheet.
“I can’t see you. There’s something in the way.”
Dr. Gilkus held the white sheet in his hands and flung it to the floor beside the mirror.
Two Gilkus’, identical in appearance, stood before each other. Both wide eyed, they studied their separate movements. Independent movements, though they both gazed into the same mirror. One Dr. Gilkus held up his right hand, the other tilted his head.
The first Gilkus’ nerves surged with excitement and awe. A smile appeared on his face.
“It worked? Are you really there?”
“I’m here, and I am certainly not your reflection,” the other Gilkus chuckled.
“And, it would seem that I am not yours, either.”
“It would seem so.”
The amazement that he was communicating with another version from himself, from another universe, came over the original doctor. They both stopped speaking for a moment and then in near unison a solitary word, incredible, escaped from both of their mouths.
The second Gilkus turned to the desk behind him and began scribbling things in a notebook. The original doctor broke from his stupor as well, and did the same.
“You know, of course, we realize now, that it merely took time for our settings, our branches, to diverge.”
“Correct,” the second Gilkus said. “But, let me ask you something. How long ago did you switch on your mirror?”
“Well,” the first doctor glanced at a clock on the wall. “As of about one hour ago, two weeks.”
“Same for me. It was you in the mirror that night, when I thought I had failed miserably and spent two weeks away. It must’ve been working the whole time!”
“I thought I had failed as well. The time off was a much needed break anyway.”
The two dropped their nervous eyes down to their papers. For the first Gilkus, it felt strange to want to defend his actions against a man who was essentially his exact copy. More exact than identical twin brothers.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that you could be thinking the same thoughts that I am.”
The other doctor looked up.
“Unlikely. Our thoughts are two weeks removed from each other. An infinite number of small, differing events have brought us here tonight. Our minds could be thinking thoughts as different as a tiger is from a kitten. For instance, I received a pen this morning from one of my students as a gift…”
“A beautiful gold pen engraved with our name? I received one as well, and I was wondering, just a moment ago, if you too felt at all guilty for taking the two weeks away from your students?”
The other Gilkus blinked. He made no attempt to hide the depth of his thoughts right then. Finally he looked back up at the first Gilkus.
“Perhaps our two branches are closer than I assumed. It would be amazing, but not impossible, since any given moment in time can have an infinite number of consequential moments, that we just happen to be communicating between two branches that have not diverged, and will not diverge, in any significant way.”
“My thoughts, exactly!”
They both laughed and enjoyed together the preparing of a presentation to give to their students the following morning.
…
On the next Saturday, the time had come for the initial reveal of Dr. Gilkus’ Quantum Mirror to the local scientific community.
“There is no possible way that they won’t be impressed, doctor. You’re a famous scientist now, or you will be soon.”
GIlkus attempted to calm his vibrating hands as Thomas helped straighten his bow tie.
“If only I had a mirror. I’d straighten the tie myself!” Gilkus said with a little nervous anger.
Thomas let out a hearty laugh.
“You do have a mirror. Though, I’m sure the man in it has the same lack of fashion sense that you do,” Thomas said, smiling.
“Gah! Fashion is for those who have the energy for it.”
“And for those who are about to present their life’s work to all the major scientists in the city!”
Thomas finished his adjusting and took a step back.
“Will your wife be in the audience tonight?” Gilkus asked.
“She will, and she’ll be as surprised as anyone else. I haven’t said a thing to her about it all week.”
“I admire Arlene. Putting up with your late nights at the lab, and your keeping of secrets. Thomas, you found a good woman. In my experience, a marriage is no place for a scientist. But you and Arlene have proven me wrong.”
“Thank you, doctor. I’ll tell her you said that.”
“It’s the truth!” Gilkus glanced at the clock in the dressing room. “Time to go!” He said, with a rise of his eyebrows and a forced smile.
The mirror was framed by a carved wooden border which had been painted gold. The corners were designed with curls and swoops and were now peaking out from beneath a blanket as the mirror stood, center stage, in a large auditorium. It was being lit by several spot lights that beamed from the above balconies.
It’s all very theatrical. We are in a theatre after all, the doctor thought. The crowd bustled and then hushed as the master of ceremonies appeared and began speaking. Gilkus waited in the wings for his cue.
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! Tonight, what you are about to see will completely change what you consider to be true about physical science. This achievement, I know you will agree, is no mere attraction. Even more, this night is set to change science itself, in an unforeseeable way! Now, without further ado, may I present to you, Dr. Emmit Gilkus and his life’s work, The Quantum Mirror!“
An applause trickled from the audience as Dr. Gilkus walked to the front of the mirror. A few of his fellow scientists were enthusiastic, the ones who knew him, but the rest applauded out of politeness.
“Good evening fellow scientists,” the doctor began, “In 1925, Dr. Werner Heisenberg discovered that the behavior of electrons is uncertain while unobserved by an experimenter. Thus, he changed the role of the experimenter in the field of theoretical physics. While in my twenties, at college, I became obsessed with the idea of the experimenter being an experiment himself. Over time, I began to formulate a hypothesis. Since particles are allowed to be in this state of limbo, there must also be the chance that one could actually observe behaviours which differ from the expected ones. In essence, I wanted to fool the universe into thinking I was not looking at it. I know, the idea sounds completely insane. Well, I can assure you, it is possible.”
The crowd seemed unsure of what to think and waited quietly. Dr. Gilkus paused for a few moments and passed his eyes across each person in the front row, afraid he was losing them.
“I… had prepared a short explanation of the materials and processes behind my experiment but I realized that it would be best to just demonstrate for now. I hope many of you will read my published findings as soon as they are released, but for now, observe.”
The doctor removed the covering from the mirror just as he had done on Monday, two hands grabbing and swiftly whipping to the side. A clearly audible gasp rose like smoke from the audience. They set their eyes on the face of the mirror for the first time.
In it they saw a normal reflection of the room they were in, just as expected, but one thing was different. There was not one human figure in the reflection, just a concert hall full of empty red chairs. Dr. Gilkus stepped in front of the mirror and waved his arms to show that he himself was not reflected by the mirror.
“My friends, what you are seeing is a window into just one of an infinite number of possible branches off of our universe. This particular branch was created the moment I switched on the machine that powers this mirror. I and my students and colleagues, during the past four years, have been able to isolate what it is that causes electrons to… consider themselves as having been observed. To achieve the effect that you see here we must do what I call a mixing and demixing of waves and particles before and after they touch the mirror. The empty room you see here actually exists, an infinite number of branches exist, but they exist somewhere where our naked eyes can not see them. This mirror allows us to do just that.”
He gave the crowd a moment to consider the implications of the experiment. Then the real applause came. Starting as a trickle like before, but then becoming raucous.
Dr. Gilkus waited for them to finish.
“Naturally, the world of this other branch is not able to sense, at all, that we are observing it, but science has a way of bending nature. When the other branch was created, another Dr. Gilkus, and another mirror, existed along with it. After two weeks, our branches had diverged enough that is was possible to speak to one another. So, the Dr. Emmit Gilkus whom you are about to meet can see you in his mirror just as well as you can see him in ours.”
With those words, the second Dr. Gilkus walked into the view of the audience. His form and sounds fluttered and wavered. The two nearly identical scientists finished the presentation together and the first Gilkus assumed that the wavering and fluttering was merely distortion, an effect of the mixing and demixing.
…
“I think I came up with a name for you.”
“A name for me?” said the first Dr. Gilkus. It was the morning after the presentation and the two Gilkus’ were discussing further experiments that could be done with their mirrors.
“Yes. We can’t go on calling each other by our real names. It’s disturbing for me, to call you by my name, and it could end up causing a great deal of confusion some day. That is why I have decided to call you Dr. Tim Suklig.” He pronounced it sue-kleeg. “It is part of our first name and our whole last name, both backward, since you are my mirror image,” the second doctor said with a mischievous smile.
The first doctor raised an eyebrow.
“I hadn’t considered it to be a problem, our name. But, you’re right. It could eventually cause confusion. Especially in published papers. Since it was your idea, I guess I’ll allow you to call me that. The name will grow on me, I’m sure.”
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